He was, Derek realized, now as small and not as young as he had first imagined. He about Conn’s height, and he looked as if he might be the same age as Derek, maybe older. He had seen things if the stories were true, and even in his smile a shadow was on him. He was a true Royan, darker than Quinton, the same rich brown as the Lord Ohean and most of the Western Royan and Chyrans. His hair was not curled though, but thick wavy crown and at the top, like a devil’s horn stuck up as if in permanent sarcastic shock like his one raised eyebrow.
“You are surprised?” Michael Flynn said looking around at them,
“No one answer.
“We thought…” Matteo began, “that you would be…”
“Taller?” he guessed.
Matteo stumbled over words.
“Older? A myth? More handsome? Surely not. I think I’m handsome a plenty.”
“I think we thought,” Derek began, “all of those things. But my lord, I am pleased to meet you.”
“There will be no lords here, Derek Annakar,” Robin said, not explaining how he knew him, ‘save the Lord of the Greenwood. Rest yourselves. You are guest here, and it is time for us to feast.”
When Cal asked if he could be useful, Derek wanted to curse him because the only thing he wanted after the whole afternoon of walking, was to sit, but Robin knew this and said, “We don’t need you to do anything at all.”
“I cannot believe it,” Gabriel said. “I cannot believe Anson knows Michael Flynn.”
Then, when Gabriel had stopped saying it, he said, “Though I should believe it. He was, after all, always devoted to the Greenwood.”
“Whatever are you talking about?” Derek asked, and Gabriel said,
“Why, Lord Michael, I suppose we should call him now, he is friends with Prince Anson. They were soldiers together. They went to war together and stood together at the battle of Corazon Hill, and then he came back here, I suppose when we all came back to Kingsboro.”
“Ah, but that’s right,” and Derek remembered that last night when Prince Anson had come ot the Temple. He had said he came with someone else into the city but that he was not in the Blue Temple, He had gone to the Grove because he and a friend were devoted to the Greenwood. So that was Michael Flynn, And, of course, Gabriel and Cal knew him, for the very next day, Cal had gone south to the town of Rutupiae to stay with Anson for the night and come back resolved to go to war with him and serve as a Blue Priests to Anson and whoever would come to him on the battle field. Gabriel had gone with him and Derek now remembered that through that last year, when he had taught Conn to be a blue priest, his two friends had been at war, and apparently been at war with this Michael Flynn.
Derek was surprised by how quickly the night was drawing on, but then it was spring, not summer, and they had been traveling since morning. The chirruping of crickets could be heard in the forests, and torches were lit as the camp was filled with the smells of sizzling food.
The trees of this wood were so very old they were wide as several men and bent, twisted by time into forms, many of them, housing all manner of life though the trees themselves were often dead. The shadows they made on the ground while Michael led them had made Imogen and Anson and the others feel something higher than eeriness.
“Lonesomeness,” Derek said. “Yes.”
“The Ayl,” Michael said, “more than the Hale, though the Hale as well now, have a foot in two worlds. There is the world of the North from whence Eoga and his corsairs came, and this land, the Royan land, which the Royan blood you possess has always known. And so always there is something calling to us. We are home, and yet home is somewhere just over the hill.”
Michael Flynn had led them by paths they had not dared to travel into the depths of Ardan Wood, and now they descended into a deep clearing, large as a castle. Here, in the night there were many more men and not only men but women and children, living freely in the forest like the First Men of the long ago world. Boars were roasting over fires, and boys were jumping over ditches, playing at arms. Still others were, tending horses, preparing food for the morrow or for the late night as if they were, indeed in a castle. They possessed everything but the walls, and walls seemed a thing beyond these people.
“It seemed as if you were working a great magic,” Wolf said to Ohean, “when that last arrow came. “But then it was Michael.”
“Can you not see, Wolf?” Polly, the black haired companion to Michael Flynn said, “That was a great magic.”
It was Conn who said, “After all these years do you still expect the power to be like fireworks and balls of flame? It works itself out through the way of things. Why do you think you were unscarred while you fought?”
Polly nodded in silent approval.
Derek said, “I felt all terror leave my heart. Felt strength in my hands.”
“I felt myself keener,” Anson said. “I will not say I was a poor warrior before, but I felt myself sharper, stronger, almost untouchable. Was that you?” he turned to Ohean.
“There is magic in you too,” Ohean said. “But it was partly me. As were the trees. As was the clumsiness of the brigands. But for the most part I called out to Michael Flynn and Polly. And so they came.
“You defended yourself most admirably,” Ohean added, turning to Myrne, “with that inventive spell.”
“It was actually a spell to find poison,” Myrne said. “I inverted it. I had no idea how unable I was to defend myself until then.” And then she said, turning to Polly, “and until I saw you.”
“But why do you call Ohean cousin?” Imogen asked Polly. “Are your families very close?”
“Oh, very very close,” Polly laughed. Her eyes were wide and dancing in the night. “I call him my cousin because he is. My mother is Meredith, the daughter of Nimerly, which would make me,” she turned to Anson, “your cousin too.
“My mother, his sister loved to go out into the world so did I, and it was in the world,” she touched Michael’s cheek, “that I met this one, and many adventures came to me because of him, So here I am.”
“One day, love, the adventures will be at an end.”
“Oh, I hope not,” she said, “though I could stand to leave these woods.”
“But how did you come to be in the woods?” Anson asked him.
“The same way as you, Prince Anson,” Michael said, “by the great displeasure of a treacherous king. Nearly thirty years ago, when Edmund came back into power, we thought that perhaps it was enough for him to have Inglad, which was his, or even Hale, but he wanted North Hale. He wanted all the kingdoms the House of Dayne had seized in their years of power. People had come behind him, but after he killed his own brother—”
“I have never heard anyone say he killed Edred,” Wolf interrupted.
“We speak the truth here in this wood,” Michael Flynn said. “And after he poisoned him, with Ulfin Baldwin’s help, I know, all he wanted was an empire. Not justice. That was why he killed the last of the Wulfstans.
“But it was not enough to kill Edred or the Wulfstans. One by one he dispossessed—or disappeared—any lord who resisted his power, anyone who remembered the old Wulfstans. Such a one was my father, Garrett Flynn of Locksley. In time he took all my father’s land and saw that he died of a broken heart as much as poverty. When I knew I was as good as dead, I fled here, into these woods, and many men came to me, for in the three kingdoms hard times had begun.”
“I was a singer in the court of Ambridge,” said a tall man with a long nose, “but the king found the tales of Alan a Dale a little too true, and so I would have died had not Michael learned of me, and rescued me.”
“I cannot speak of it,” a rough jawed man called Red Bill said. “I will not say what happened, but here I am.”
In the midst of them, stood Derek, Conn, Gabriel and the other Blues. Beside them, looking at him with great sympathy, was a long tall monk who said, “There is much sorrow here for every priest to heal. Edmund replaced all the Sendic monks in my monastery with Black Monks from Daumany who spoke the Dauman tongue. And so I am here. He is half Dauman and scarcely a Wulfstan at all, and he would see all the three kingdoms be as he has made Inglad. As he will soon make Hale.”
“And so we are here,” Michael said, “and forgive me for this prophecy,” he turned to Anson, “but now that your brother is lord in Kingsboro, all those who came to Westrial for some measure of peace, and all those who counted on it being a land of reason, will soon see how unreasonable it is. These woods, mark my words, will be filled with refugees fleeing Cedd. You are merely the first.”
